However much they may enjoy watching Captain von Trapp sing “Edelweiss” in The Sound of Music, most Catholic intellectuals nowadays are squeamish about delving too deeply into the production’s historical background. Such reticence is hardly surprising, for in Von Trapp’s day Catholic Austria was led by Engelbert Dollfuss—a man deeply enthusiastic about his Germanic heritage,...
The Turkic peoples began as steppe nomads, then became soldiers and eventually farmers and city-dwellers. As they made these transitions they came to dominate ancient centers along the Silk Road. So they ended up at crossroads and thoroughfares, places where Christian, Muslim, and Jew met with those from farther afield. Such places seem romantic, but...
“In delay there lies no plenty” sang Feste, the controlling figure in Twelfth Night. Theresa May would disagree. She has used delay as the vital investment of her government since its formation, and her personal plenty is the dividend. Her plan, as I set out in my July (2018) piece in Chronicles, is to rely...
Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery. “Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow,...
Having mistakenly thought that he had killed his rival during a fight over a girl, 16-year old Simon Kenton headed west from Virginia into Kentucky. Before he turned 20 Kenton had established himself as a first-rate ranger and Indian fighter, and he had become a frontier icon by the time he died in 1836 at...
Immigration is to Donald Trump what Central America was to Ronald Reagan. It’s where a presidency would succeed or fail. When Reagan left office, the Sandinista were still in power in Nicaragua, but the Cold War, as anyone could see, was winding down. And it did just that, on Nov. 9, 1989, with the collapse...
This weekend brought the sad news of the death of Hollywood director Stanley Donen, at the age of 94. Donen directed many fine films, including the wonderfully Hitchcockian Charade, but the focus of the tributes is rightly on an undoubted American masterpiece, Singin’ in the Rain, a film that epitomizes Hollywood’s Golden Age. The entire...
In the Venezuelan crisis, said President Donald Trump in Florida, “All options are on the table.” And if Venezuela’s generals persist in their refusal to break with Nicolas Maduro, they could “lose everything.” Another example of Yankee bluster and bluff? Or is Trump prepared to use military force to bring down Maduro and install Juan...
On February 19, Serbia’s Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic received Venezuela’s Deputy FM Ivan Hill and reiterated Serbia’s position of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The following day U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Kyle Scott responded with a tweet (in Serbian), warning that “Serbia is on the wrong side of history” for not recognizing “the provisional...
Britain today presents the exhilarating spectacle of its two main political parties facing imminent collapse. If there is No Brexit, the Tories will split, says Charles Moore, the doyen of Conservative commentary. Labour has already split, with Monday’s announcement that seven MPs have resigned from the party (and eighth has since done so as well)....
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. “Contrary to widespread belief, evidence is accumulating that Western democracy is in continuous and serious decline,” writes Claes Ryn in the opening of this eloquent, concise, and hard-hitting manifesto that goes immediately to the heart of our times. “Many commentators proclaim democracy’s triumph over evil political forces in...
“If you look at Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people want politicians that do what they promise,” said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno. The Spaniard was explaining to The New York Times what lay behind the rise of Vox, which the Times calls “Spain’s first far-right party since the...
The Left’s assault on history comes up with an old favourite—you have to crank up your gramophone by hand to get its flavour, as the record strives to speed at 72 revolutions, wheezing and crackling—with their latest discovery that Churchill was a “villain.” That’s the word chosen by John McDonnell, deputy to Jeremy Corbyn. His...
I just retired after serving 30 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and 16 years before that as a lawyer and Judge. Of all the great men and women with whom I have worked during my career, Walter Jones was one of the best. There is greater turnover in elective office than ever before,...
Both of America’s great national parties are coalitions. But it is the Democratic Party that never ceases to celebrate diversity—racial, religious, ethnic, cultural—as its own and as America’s “greatest strength.” Understandably so, for the party is home to a multitude of minorities. It is the domain of the LGBTQ movement. In presidential elections, Democrats win...
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to fund the wall along the nation’s southern border. Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said there was an emergency at the border which could only be fixed by building a wall. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had said before Trump’s address...
Nancy Pelosi is warning that, if Trump declares an emergency over the border, a future Democratic President could declare an emergency over gun violence. This argument is intended to frighten Republicans from taking action to prevent millions more potential Democrats streaming from Latin America into the United States. Republicans should not let themselves be frightened....
From the October 1990 issue of Chronicles. F.A. Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, offers us one insight into the nature of freedom and morality. Hayek argues that the major world religions have succeeded and endured because they reinforce the weak and imperfect points of human nature. Hayek believes that civilization is...
After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest suicide note in history.” The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic...
The Woman in White was Wilkie Collins’s finest novel. That title is on his chosen headstone. I thought of Collins, as I viewed Nancy Pelosi, “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful” at the State of the Union address. She led a cohort of Democrat ladies, cast somewhat implausibly as Vestal Virgins. You can push symbolism...
If the pollsters at CNN and CBS are correct, Donald Trump may have found the formula for winning a second term in 2020. His State of the Union address, say the two networks, met with the approval of 76 percent of all viewers—97 percent of Republicans, 82 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats....
From the October 1988 issue of Chronicles. “Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights of the world.” —Edmund Burke Some 40 nonclassic books are discussed by Professor Perrin in this pleasant volume of literary preferences. By a classic, Noel Perrin means a work that everyone recognizes as highly important, even though...
In the course of his 48-hour visit to the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis addressed an “interreligious meeting” in Abu Dhabi on February 4 and celebrated an open-air Mass attended by 135,000 Catholic guest workers the following day. His homily at the city’s Zayed Sports Stadium, inspired by the Sermon on the Mount, was unremarkable but...
“Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.” So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam. Et tu, Brute? Yet Northam had all but...
You would have thought Virginia Democrat Governor Ralph Northam had been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Martin Luther King, given the reaction to what appeared to be a page in his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook. Both the Democrats on the Left and the “virtue-signaling” Republicans and movement conservatives—that is, the near entirety...
Pope Francis arrived in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, February 3. Tonight he will address the “Muslim Council of Elders,” a body based in the UAE which supposedly “seeks to counter religious fanaticism by promoting a moderate brand of Islam.” We’ll reserve our judgment until we see the text of his speech (cf. Part II...
As the new Congress was sworn in early in January, the Republican Party unveiled a plan for its own assisted suicide. In fact, Mitt Romney got started before he was even seated as the latest senator from Utah. On January 1, he published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he accused President Trump...
Dining out with my wife in a restaurant in Paris recently, I became aware of the well-dressed Frenchman seated with his wife two tables away from us listening in on our conversation. The table for two between us was unoccupied. “Where are you from?” he inquired, in excellent English, when he saw I had noticed....
Because of the Internet, old-fashioned travel agents are nearly as obsolete as ocean-going passenger liners. In their place a new sort of agent is arising: the migrant or asylum agent, formerly known as the people smuggler. The phenomenon has recently become a well-known one in Europe especially, as smugglers respond to the desires of their...
In its issue for December 20, 2018, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.” The piece caught the attention of many American conservatives—I personally received a number of emails drawing my attention to it, all by people...
De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard; 928 pp., $39.95). Here is no doubt the best, most comprehensive, most politically balanced and appropriately distanced of the now four notable biographies of Charles de Gaulle. Previously, those by Jean Lacouture (1985-88), Paul-Marie de La Gorce (1967, rev. 1999), and Éric Roussel took pride...
Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast. The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner. Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...
Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated. In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless...
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images . . . —T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead,” The Waste Land The body of the hapless American missionary John Chau has...
It came as a bolt of lightning out of the blue. One moment the Trump administration was besieged on all sides. The media were accusing him of treason, and the Democrats, having just taken control of the House of Representatives, were promising multiple investigations. Robert Mueller was reportedly sharpening his prosecutorial knives, getting ready to...
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Produced by Annapurna Pictures Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Netflix Roma Produced by Participant Media Written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón Distributed by Netflix Near the end of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ latest cinematic whimsy being shown on Netflix, Brendan Gleeson...
For Texas conservatives, a surprisingly strong showing by Democrats in their deep-red state in November’s midterm election was an unexpected wake-up call. The results also set me to thinking about my own personal history with the Lone Star State. And how, in the absence of vigilance, the long, proud heritage of a particular place can...
Thank you for publishing the piece by David B. Schock on the Elkhart Jazz Festival of 2018 (“Blowing for Elkhart,” Correspondence, December). As a longtime resident of New Orleans in the past, I have particular reasons to savor his reports and the expressive photograph. It was dismaying, however, to learn of the marked disinterest in...
What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step. And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end? Do...
President Donald Trump’s announcement last December 19 that he would immediately withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria (and one-half of the Afghan contingent) is the most important single decision of his presidency. The mission in Syria had never been about “regime change” in Damascus, or “eliminating Iranian influence,” or establishing Kurdish autonomy. Two years ago...
Last year, just before his 21st birthday, my son Jacob learned of a condition called aphantasia. In its strictest form, aphantasia is the inability to create mental images. Like many such conditions, aphantasia affects those who have it to varying degrees. In Jacob’s case, his mental images are very fuzzy and indistinct. In my case,...
Of our 20th-century wars World War II stands alone. In a sneak attack early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese naval forces bombed Pearl Harbor. As reports were broadcast throughout the day American shock turned to anger. The following day Congress, with but one dissenting vote—pacifist Jeannette Rankin—declared war on Japan. We were a...
The world lacks drinking games relating to women’s studies, so here’s a suggestion: If you can get a women’s studies stalwart to say the word coverture before the conversation’s second minute elapses, throw one back for the 21st Amendment. Then you’ll be comfortable as you receive a wealth of information about women under English Common...
To manifest his opposition to President Donald Trump’s decision to pull all 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria, and half of the 14,000 in Afghanistan, Gen. James Mattis went public and resigned as secretary of defense. Now Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in public testimony to Congress, has contradicted Trump about the threats that...
One of the easiest-to-diagnose symptoms of the existential crisis that is causing the decline and fall of Western civilization is the deepening disconnect between peoples and governments. A perfect example is Britain, where in the 2016 Brexit referendum 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union (a clear-cut majority of 52 percent on a...
The current American cultural and economic transformation, which arguably started in the late 20th century, is now approaching its nadir. Americans will more likely mourn this transition than celebrate it. The United States has regressed in terms of the typical evolution of a country since roughly 1980. Rather than evolving into a higher level of...
One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck. Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...
Sometimes the best things come in distorting packages, no matter how good they are. And sometimes that good is itself misleading when it has great appeal, or even particularly then. I was not yet a teenager when I stumbled into the discovery of a recording of tremendous command—an LP with Schumann’s Carnaval, Op. 9, on...
Embracing both, and rejecting the United States of Now. Allen Tate, in 1952, argued that the first duty of the man of letters in the postwar world was to purify the language from the corruptions introduced by ideology and the destruction, more than physical, wrought by the recent world war. He was not the only...
